Wins and Losses at the Final Summit

The fourth and final nuclear security summit saw some serious progress, but also some missed opportunities.

On the progress side:

• Enough states ratified the 2005 amendment to the Physical Protection Convention to finally bring the amendment into force. That will provide a somewhat stronger legal foundation for nuclear security efforts – and will trigger a review conference that some hope could be a key new element of the nuclear security architecture.
• China and India joined in the Strengthening Nuclear Security Implementation Initiative, thereby committing to achieve the objectives of International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) nuclear security recommendations and accept peer reviews of their security arrangements.
• Japan and the United States removed hundreds of kilograms of weapons-grade plutonium and highly enriched uranium from the Fast Critical Assembly in Japan, as promised at the last summit.
• States agreed to 18 new group commitments or “gift baskets,” on topics ranging from protecting against insider threats to replacing radiological sources with less dangerous technologies. Probably the most important of these was the commitment to create a “Nuclear Security Contact Group”—a set of senior officials that will keep meeting on the margins of the IAEA General Conference—to keep at least moderately high-level attention focused on nuclear security.

On the missed opportunity side:

• We still have no progress toward building a global commitment that all nuclear weapons and weapons-usable nuclear materials, wherever they may be, need to be secured against the full spectrum of plausible adversary threats.
• The communiqué, as expected, offers no firm new commitments (though it does more firmly establish the goal of continuous improvement in nuclear security).  More disappointing, the “action plans” for five international institutions offer few steps beyond what those institutions are already doing—certainly less than is needed to fill the gap left by the end of the summit process.
• Many of the gift baskets have few specifics or deadlines; how much they will actually do to accelerate progress toward their objectives remains unknown.
• Many key countries—including Pakistan,  Russia, and others—are still not participating in the initiative on strengthening nuclear security implementation that China and India have joined.

Where do we go from here? As discussed in our new report, Preventing Nuclear Terrorism: Continuous Improvement or Dangerous Decline?, the U.S. government and other interested states need to push hard to keep high-level attention focused on continuous improvement in nuclear security and on combating complacency. We make a number of suggestions in the report on how to do that.

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This article was previously published on the Belfer Center's Nuclear Security Matters blog and in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. View the original at belfercenter.org/2016WinsLosses.

Read the full report: Preventing Nuclear Terrorism: Continuous Improvement or Dangerous Decline?

For a compilation of Belfer Center expert analysis and commentary related to the Nuclear Security Summit, see here.